Political proselytizing should not happen in public school

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, state and local politicians did come and give talks at whichever public school I happened to attend at the time. The politicians’ topics were invariably uplifting things about civic involvement, public service, the great people of San Francisco or California, or similar anodyne, non-partisan stuff. Those days are over.

Congressman Jared Huffman did not hold back Tuesday as he discussed next month’s inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump with Mill Valley Middle School students.

[snip]

Huffman, who was elected last month to his third term, went to the middle school to talk with eighth-graders after receiving a batch of letters from them. The letters expressed opposition to the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline project proposed to carry crude oil from the Bakken fields in Western North Dakota to Illinois. [No doubt written as a school assignment, if I know my Marin public schools . . . and I do.]

[snip]

Huffman said people across the nation will have to engage if they want to fight Trump’s interests, such as softening environmental regulations and deporting undocumented immigrants.

He said more letter-writing and other actions might be necessary in the next four years.

Huffman discussed complexities he sees as problematic under a Trump administration, including the former real estate tycoon’s business dealings. He referred to reports earlier this week that suggest Turkey’s government is leveraging Trump’s business interests with the arrest of Barbaros Muratoglu, a businessman with close ties to Trump.

“I think the deeper we look into that, the more we’re going to consider that this web of business interests he has all over the world — Japan, Russia and all these different countries — will make it very hard for us to have confidence that he’s governing in the interest of our country and not in the interest of the Trump corporation,” he said.

I am seldom at a loss for words, but I was after reading the above — or at least I was at a loss for any words that weren’t the worst kind of obscenities. It’s beyond outrageous that an elected official would go to a public school, the funds for which come from money the government forcibly extracts from people of all political stripes, and indoctrinate the children in hard-Left Progressive politics. That is a grotesque violation of the public trust.

If you read the comments to the newspaper article from which I quoted, you’ll see that other sane people in Marin were as offended as I about the fact that a Progressive pol got his nasty talons in young people on the public dime. Again, this is what put Trump in the White House. Progressives have no boundaries, and like Leftists from the Soviet Union to East Germany to Cuba to China, view the classroom as the ultimate place to capture them young. As someone reminded me, it was Lenin who said “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

In a just world, Huffman would be censured on the floor of the House for so disgracefully abusing vulnerable children. In the real world, Mill Valley’s mostly hard-Left parent community is probably congratulating itself for getting bang from its political buck.

This is the kind of thing, of course, that saw Trump end up in the White House. It’s fine when Huffman goes to the House of Representatives in Washington and makes those views known, or goes to a voluntary gathering of Progressive adults whose views align with his, or goes to a political debate where an audience can hear all sorts of views.

What is completely wrong — banana republic stuff — is for him to spout party propaganda to a captive audience made up of defenseless students who undoubtedly think that someone who got elected to go to Washington is a person of substance and intelligence, rather than a small-minded, intellectually corrupt, propagandist using taxpayer money to proselytize his views to susceptible children who cannot be expected to understand that there is a valid opposition to his bias, ignorance, and anti-American attitude.